SMD Site Recap and Goals

Where SMD is at and Where We’re Going (I hope).
- This post is to pause and reflect and take a look around. It’s easy to get swept up in the endless number of things to do on the site (I am creating the application and structure as I go), the endless number of stories to write and therefore loose site of the scenery on the journey.
- Smart Money Daily went live 6 weeks ago and so far I am quite pleased with the results. If I measure traffic ( see the stats as of March 12) I am getting about 70 visitors a day with an average of about 110 page views a day or 3300 per month. One of the most encouraging things about the chart is that the number of visitors is steadily climbing. If I draw an imaginary line in there it looks like I am averaging a growth of about 10 a week. Cool!
- Since I’m getting almost zero traffic from search engines (more on that below) the only way people have found me is from my posts to various forums and comments on other finance and personal commentary sites.
- It is my goal with this site to replace a good chunk of my current income by the time my contract expires in September 2006. Therefore if I add 10 visitors average a week for 75 weeks, I will have 820 visitors a day. Calculate ~2 page views per visitor average (I’m optimistic that when the site is more complete they will click around a little more), so that will be 1620 pages a day. Multiply by 30 and I’ll be at ~50,000 page views a month. At a 2% click-through (not my current rate but a reasonable target from what I have read) with .25 cents per click I will be earning $250 per month.
- These numbers are well below my goals. One thing I haven’t factored in is the exponential nature of the web. It goes something like this: the more people that know about something the more people who are likely to hear about it. The more links there are to a site the higher it goes in the search engines, then searchers are more likely to find it. So the flaw (hopefully) in my prediction is that growth will not be in a straight line but more parabolic.
- Other factors include my ability to synergize my efforts. This can be done by adding more related sites. Increasing the number of sites, including some that are much narrower in scope to better optimize for keywords and payouts. This should prove to be a good strategy. I call it webbing the web. I am hoping to have my sites set up so that I can post one article to multiple sites simultaneously if it’s content is appropriate.
- Other possibilities: sponsorships and other financial spin-offs; online or offline consulting, selling the site that I am building as a template or releasing it as open source. Becoming a hosting reseller and business blog consultant.Stats and Considerations
- No search engine traffic (3 hits so far in total). There are two reasons for this. One is that the keywords that I compete against are highly competitive so until my site is much more complete and has a lot more content it will not get any notice and rankings and two is that Google hasn’t indexed my pages yet.

Pages Indexed

Links

MSN

31

15

Yahoo

7

3

Google

3

1

- What it will take to replace my primary income of $4000/month by the time my job ends (Sept 2006). Assuming a 2% click through rate at $.25/click it will take 16,000 click throughs per month on 800,000 page views. Given that my current projects are for 50,000 page views by the target date I am going to have to grow at a much steeper rate than I am currently. I’ll get back to update when I figure out how this is going to happen…after all I’m still a rookie in this game.